


Elements

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: 1980s, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Coming In Pants, Coming Untouched, Daemon Separation, Daemon Touching, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Kingsman Training, M/M, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-07-28 13:28:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7642456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Limits must be tested. A spy is a better spy when their daemon is separated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theoldgods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/gifts).



> For reference... [these are Merlin, Harry, Roxy and Eggsy's daemons](http://i.imgur.com/tQRHym8.jpg).
> 
> eta: Going to be a series now because I don't have enough WIPs already...

It's the worst part of training. The entire household always seems to know when this task is about to happen even without being told, as though there's a static charge in the air sending the message around like a memo. Merlin gets uneasy nods and attempts at reassuring smiles from the people he passes in the corridors on the way to the library and does his best to return them, though this whole awful ordeal still makes him want to vomit even when he's not the one enduring it.

"Harry," he says quietly, tapping the sensor at the brim of his glasses to connect. "Holding up?"

"Ask me again in an hour." His voice always goes brisk and businesslike when he's trying to hide how shredded his nerves are. "Not sure I shall ever forgive you and Arthur for not letting me be there."

"You've forgiven us for much worse."

"You're a monster," Harry accuses, but he sounds marginally less fraught, even like he might be smiling a bit. Merlin hears the whoosh of a sigh – then faintly in the background a familiar wooden creak, sounding suspiciously like a gigantic stag climbing onto furniture he's repeatedly been asked not to climb on.

"Are you letting your beast lie on the sofa again?"

"Maybe," Harry says evasively. Above Merlin's head, his falcon daemon swoops round in a circle and comes to land on his shoulder, sharp little claws pressing into the leather patches on his jumper.

"Tell them they're idiots."

"Ishbel says you're both idiots."

The indistinct murmur of voices, then Harry says, "Ozymandias says Ishbel is the loveliest creature he's ever known."

"One day their flirting won't work on us any more," she says as she takes off again, "and then where will they be?"

"Lost and broken," Merlin grumbles, and Harry in his ear laughs, finally, a proper laugh instead of a nervous trembling breath. It's strangely calming – the only sound in the world that could have made Merlin feel ready to face what's about to happen.

"What did she say?"

"She loves you."

"Oh. Well, you ought to know Ozymandias is thoroughly besotted with you, too. Rather embarrassing, really. He writes bad poetry about your storm-tossed eyes and so on."

" _Goodbye_ , Harry," Merlin says, fighting back his sudden smile so that when he opens the library door to greet Roxy and Nikephoros he looks grave, all business, ready to instruct them in this most gruelling and terrible of tests.

 

* * *

 

Before he was Merlin, when he was still Ray Malcolm from Stirling with too many O Levels and not enough job prospects, he thought he saved a man's life. The man was showing off to girls in the upstairs pub by bragging some frankly unbelievable stories about his travels and adventures, his sleek little rabbit daemon was showing off to the girls' daemons by parading up and down the window sill and preening, and Ray acted quicker than even Ishbel could when he saw the rabbit stumble and fall off the ledge.

"I'm so sorry," he kept repeating as soon as he'd pulled the rabbit back and released her onto the sticky floor, where she managed the last few feet to her human and huddled in his arms when he picked her up. They were both trembling; the man looked a hideous pale colour, sweating and red-eyed like he might be sick. Everyone in the room had gone silent, though their horrified stares said more than any words could. Ishbel jumped from Ray's shoulder to the leather wristband he always wore for her to rest on, and gratefully he started stroking her soft feathers, her little head down to her folded wings and her tail, trying to ground himself with the right sort of touch after the revulsion of someone else's daemon's fur sliding between his fingers.

"Don't," the man said weakly. He looked around him for a chair and one of the girls he'd been flirting with jumped up to offer hers, someone else passing a pint glass of water from the bar. "Don't apologise."

"She was going to fall," Ray tried to explain. All the people staring at them made him feel hot and embarrassed, and weirdly stupid as though he couldn't quite remember the shape of words any more. "It's three floors down, it would have—" _Torn you_. He couldn't say it. Didn't need to say it.

"Bloody fast hands you got," the barman said as the room slowly began to fill with noise again, people getting back to their conversations and darts now the drama was over. He fetched a bottle down and poured Ray a glass of whisky far more expensive than anything he ever bought for himself, then another for the man with the rabbit daemon. "On the house. You too, mate, you look as if you need it."

The rabbit was almost inside the man's jacket, she was huddling so close to him, but her voice was steadier than his when she looked up at Ray's daemon with her big bright eyes and asked, "What's your name?"

"Ishbel. This is Ray. We're not sorry we touched you, not if it saved your life."

"Ishbel," Ray muttered, and she looked up at him with her head cocked to the side as if to say innocently, _what?_

"Ray," the man said, finally gathering himself enough to stand up and offer a hand. "This is Derdriu. My name is Gawain. I don't suppose you'd be interested in a job interview, would you?"

 

* * *

 

"Alright," Merlin says, quiet and calm, while Roxy sits leaned over in the armchair with her head hanging between her knees and her ermine daemon doing his best to climb right inside her collar. Merlin looks away when she starts fumbling with the buttons on the front of her jumpsuit, and presumably the shirt beneath, so Nikephoros can get to her skin and huddle beside her heartbeat. Remembers his own test back in 1981, and how for several days after it he'd been covered in hundreds of jagged scratches where Ishbel, who usually liked a little bit of space, had clung desperately to any bit of him she could reach.

"Alright?" Roxy repeats, sounding hoarse and faint. Merlin goes to fetch the bottle of water he stashed in the cabinet earlier and she drinks half in one go and then the rest in smaller, shaky little sips, rubbing her cheek slowly against her daemon's head. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"Prepared for that too," Merlin tells her, reaching under the chair for a plastic washing-up bowl. It makes her laugh the same way Harry does when something isn't really funny, a wobbly sort of breath out and a muddled look in her eyes: confusion and anger and fear, but a wondrous sort of pride. "React any way you need to. This part isn't a test."

"Alright," she says again, a simmering new note of fury in her voice, and punches him so hard in the bicep that his entire arm goes numb and the bruise lingers for weeks. He can't really admonish her for it, not when she's puking up her breakfast – just grits his teeth, clutches the sore place, and stays there kneeling beside her chair, holding the bowl for her in her lap while she empties her stomach and he blink-activates Arthur's glasses feed from the other room to see how Eggsy's getting on.

Oh. Shit.

Harry's going to be livid. Partly because he's got a soft spot a mile wide for the lad, partly because he owes Merlin twenty quid now.

"God, this is pathetic," Roxy mutters, swilling her mouth with the last of the water and spitting it out into the bowl.

"Is it?" Merlin resists the urge to call her Lancelot already; Arthur will have a fit if they bugger up the normal order of things any more this year. "You're handling it better than I did. I lay foetal on the floor for twenty minutes holding my stomach with sick dribbling sideways into my ear. Galahad cried for two hours. Percival had a full blown panic attack, he said he thought he was having a heart attack."

"It does feel like it." She finds a handkerchief in her pocket and clumsily swipes her mouth, refolds it to mop the clammy sweat from her forehead and the sides of her nose. "Pulls right here. Like there's a hook. Like something's dragging..." She goes quiet and her face twists, battling the springing tears Merlin can see in her eyes and blinking them back before they can gather enough weight to fall. He feels strangely proud of her for it, even slightly in awe – she's strong, more than she knows, more than anyone suspects. She's going to be spectacular.

"Do you need a minute? More water?"

"No. I think I'm alright."

"Good. Then if you'd make your way to the east drawing room, Arthur would like a word."

 

* * *

 

As Ray and Ishbel were leaving the drawing room, slow and careful as though the ragged, aching tear inside were an actual physical injury, he saw Derdriu hop around a corner ahead of them and come closer, and he thought he might be sick again, even knowing what he knew now. Knowing Ishbel could soar away from him if she needed to after today, fly miles away, and that terrible, obscene wrenching in their hearts would never hurt again.

"Ray," she said desperately, gripping hard to his leather shoulder patch with her claws and letting her warm little body slump, exhausted and frightened, against the side of his head.

"I know," he murmured, because of course she didn't need to say it – he could feel her mourning, like vicious fingers probing at the ripped place inside of them. They were still one, they would always be one, but the drastic change in their bond would take some getting used to.

"How are you feeling?" Gawain called, finally coming into view at the far end of the corridor.

"Like I want to smash your nose out through the back of your skull," Ray told him calmly. They were bordering on being friends now, close enough that he thought he could probably get away with blunt honesty. Gawain gave him a rueful sort of smile.

"Understandable. I'm sorry I couldn't warn you. Though I doubt you'd have believed me even if I had."

"He didn't need to catch you after all," Ishbel said to Derdriu, glaring down at her sideways from her perch on Ray's shoulder. "Back in the pub. You wouldn't have torn, you were already torn."

"Would have given us away and ruined our mission, though," Gawain reminded the bristling daemons gently, eyeing them both until they subsided. "We're still grateful."

"Don't mention it," Ray mumbled, still awkward any time he remembered the sickening jolt of _wrong_ at touching someone else's daemon uninvited. "How did the others do?"

"Roger and William failed, they're on their way home. It's between you and Harry now."

Which is somehow the best possible way to end this battle, and the worst. It's already been the weirdest and most unexpected place to find a best friend, without having to fight one on one in whatever fucked up mess of a trial Merlin throws at them next.

( _How peculiar_ , Harry said the day they met, offering a beautiful monogrammed pen to fill out the next of kin details on his body bag. _A bird daemon?_

 _A male daemon?_ Ray countered, pointing the pen at the stag Harry was leaning against, legs crossed casually like a youth lounging at a bus stop, and Harry gave him a sideways grin and a shrug that could have meant anything.)

 

* * *

 

"I've done something stupid," Harry says instead of a hello when he steps off the train. He looks old, somehow. That hangdog expression he gets when he's upset adds fifteen years to the smirks and darting glances when he's in the middle of a fight. And he's wearing that fucking cardigan again, beige like someone's grandad.

"Have you," Merlin says, not inflecting it like a question. He didn't watch the conversation, thought they should have a bit of privacy, but it's not difficult to imagine how it went. He holds his office door open and Ishbel flies through first, soaring around in a circle to land on an antler when Ozymandias follows her. Harry comes through last, one hand resting briefly on Merlin's hip as he passes as if that little point of contact is enough to ground him, calm him down.

"Mm."

"Cardi off," Merlin instructs, fetching a garment bag the housekeeper just brought up from laundry and unzipping it, slipping it away from the hanger, holding out the pristine suit and then shaking it impatiently when Harry just stands there looking mournful. "Armour on."

There are mission things to discuss, but it's a long flight and Harry's never been the type to settle enough to sleep whilst in the air. They've got time.

"Did you explain?" Merlin asks quietly, spinning slightly from side to side in his huge leather chair. He watches Harry's fingers, long and nimble and lovely, deftly unbutton his old shirt and put on the new one.

"Badly. He came storming into the house as I was coming downstairs, and the look on his face when he noticed I was alone... and poor Polly, horrified, hiding behind his legs as if I were something from a nightmare."

"It's never pleasant. Your first time seeing it."

"No, but I might have handled it better. I was angry and unreasonable."

"Harry Hart, angry and unreasonable? Never." Harry gives him a black look as he's fastening his tie, and Merlin reaches for him, finds his wrist, his hand, draws him closer until Harry's perched slightly uncomfortably on his knee. He's far too big and heavy for this, but the absurdity of it always makes him smile so it's got to be worth a shot – and he relaxes at once, leaning back at a bit of an awkward angle to tuck his face into Merlin's neck and kiss him there, breathing warm and slowly against his skin.

"I'm an idiot."

"Yes."

"He's just a scared boy."

"He's not a boy."

"But he was scared."

"So were we all. Limits—"

"—must be tested. I know. I told him." For a while Harry's silent, fingertips drawing idle little nonsense patterns on the front of Merlin's jumper, then he adds, "He'll be my proposal next time as well, you know."

"I know."

"For as long as it takes."

"I know."

"I told him I'll sort this mess out when I get back. I know he can do this."

Then Ozymandias nudges him gently with his nose, Ishbel still balancing on his antler with practiced ease. "Stop moping. We're already late."

"You're always late," Ishbel reminds them severely. "Harry, put your trousers on."

 

* * *

 

There was a tree behind the house, marvellously twisted branches like an illustration from a fairytale, which Harry had claimed as his territory on their first rare afternoon off. He was always there any time he could get away – preferred being outdoors, he said, on account of having a daemon roughly the size of a double decker bus. Even the grandeur of the house couldn't totally accommodate Ozymandias: ostentatiously decorated ceilings seemed too low, wide doorways built for crinolines and phalanxes of servants seemed too narrow.

"I feel bloody stupid for not expecting it," was the first thing Harry said, all desperate red eyes and wet cheeks, when Ray and Ishbel found them there.

"Who'd ever expect something like this?"

"Yes, but whoever heard of a spy with a fucking enormous stag for a daemon? Of course they'd make us separate."

Ray didn't comment on the tears, and Harry didn't comment on the lingering smell of sick. They sat in silence side by side after that, Ray leaning against the knotted trunk of the tree with Ishbel trembling in his lap, and Harry half draped across his daemon, fingers clutching tightly to the thick fur on his flank.

Ozymandias sounded exhausted when he asked, "Does it still hurt?" and Ray could feel Ishbel hesitate for a moment under his stroking fingertips before she flew over to land on his antler.

"Not like a cut or a bruise," she tried to explain. Harry sniffed hard, scrubbed his sleeve across his eyes and streaming nose, and glanced fleetingly at Ray as though he wanted to say something but couldn't. "It's a different pain. Is that how it is for you?"

"Yes."

"Yes," Harry confirmed, and there was something so dull and broken in his voice that Ray reached for him without meaning to, spontaneous and unthinking where Ishbel was always so careful and deliberate, and took his hand. "What are you doing?"

"I don't know. Do you mind?"

"No." He turned his hand over slowly, baring his palm and letting Ray slide his fingers across it, then even slower still he wriggled around until he was lying in the dappled shadow of the tree with his head in Ray's lap where Ishbel had been before, and his socked feet, shoes discarded somewhere, pressed against his daemon's shaggy side. "Did you ever imagine we'd be the last ones left?"

"Not for a moment."

"I hope you don't think this"—Harry made a vague gesture at their positions—"means we're not going to fight you to the death for this job if we need to," and Ray grabbed that hand out of the air as well, winding their fingers together and bringing them to his mouth to press a clumsy kiss against Harry's knuckles. The way Harry smiled then, wide and surprised, his entire handsome face creasing with it, almost made the jagged torn bond start to hurt a little less.

"If we can send them off spying without us now," Ray said, faking nonchalance to hide the way his heart was suddenly fluttering, "maybe we can send them to fetch us some drinks."

"Don't push it," Ozymandias told him lazily, and when Harry laughed and squeezed Ray's hand it was like an unexpected promise of something wonderful.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry would always blame the daemons for what happened, as though he wouldn't have got so carried away if they hadn't started it.

The room where they sleep – which Merlin and the agents call the barracks but Harry calls _the dorm_ with a faint curled sneer, as if he can't help comparing it unfavourably with whatever mysterious luxuries he presumably had at his boarding school – has been feeling larger and quieter and stranger as the other candidates left. Now it's just the two of them it feels cavernous and cold, and without even needing to discuss it Harry and Ray both start silently shifting their things from the spaces they've had since the start to the two beds nearest the door, farthest from the toilets and the disturbing two-way mirror that faces them.

"I'll have this one," Ozymandias says, nosing at the pillow on the bed next to Harry's, already stripped bare by the housekeepers since the other lads were kicked out, and Ishbel gives him a strange sideways glance from her place on Ray's shoulder. The stag gets a stubborn look on his face then – somehow, amazingly, just like Harry's when someone tells him he needs to get out of bed and into clothes before Merlin makes him run laps of the grounds again for being late. "If you tell me I don't deserve furniture just as much as anybody else I shall be very cross with you. We've discussed this."

"It's not that." Ray feels a brief, gentle flutter of movement, Ishbel cocking her head the way she always does when they're thinking. "It's just that you're very far away from him."

Not that it matters, really. Ray's lost count of the number of times he's woken up in the night for a piss and seen Harry's bed crumpled and empty as he passed, then the heap of paisley pyjamaed limbs on the floor where Harry resettled himself with his daemon as a pillow, arms draped around Ozymandias' neck or clutching his leg like a teddy bear.

"She has a point," Harry says, fiddling with the alarm clock his proposer gave him for his nineteenth birthday a few weeks ago. He stops rearranging his things on his new bedside table and lies on his side, body and legs curled like an elegant question mark, and reaches out his hand until his straining fingers are still a good two feet away from his daemon. "I shan't be able to sleep with you all the way over there."

"Merlin did say we ought to practice being apart."

Ishbel makes a low unhappy noise and moves to Ray's wristband from his shoulder patch, and he curls her close into the warm breadth of his body, stroking her soft feathers. It's a motion as familiar as breathing by now, the one thing that's always calmed them both better than anything else ever since the day Ishbel settled in her falcon form when they were thirteen. Later, Ray will remember this as the moment he knew Harry would win the Galahad title, and that he didn't mind. _Limits must be tested_ , Arthur had said to them both over the dinner table, where they'd sat for two hours pushing food around their plates, weak and vaguely nauseated, while their fuming daemons were made to wait outside. The most obvious thing this test proved, Ray thinks, is that he's probably not the man for the job.

He wakes in the night aching somewhere inside, but it's the dull sort of sensation of a lingering bruise instead of the sickening mental rip he'd felt in the testing room. It's an odd feeling; there's a sort of resignation in it, like the creeping insistence of an old bereavement that sneaks up on you sometimes years after the initial bright flare of pain to say _hey, you're doing alright, but don't forget me_. Instinctively he reaches for Ishbel's perch, a utilitarian sort of thing provided for them here – worlds away from the lovely old carved wooden one he inherited from his grandmother and her kestrel daemon – but she's not there.

"Look," Harry says in a rough, sleepy sort of whisper. Ray sees him then: he's sitting up in bed with the blankets pooled around his legs and his pyjama shirt twisted and hanging off one pale shoulder, and his ridiculous hair sticking up in every direction like he's had an electric shock in his sleep. It's probably not very wise or polite to stare at Harry as much as he'd like to in the daylight, but in the soft shadows of a quiet closed room it feels permissible somehow: his exposed collarbone, the long line of his neck, the dark pink creases the pillow's pressed into his cheek while he slept.

"At what?"

"Ozymandias and Ishbel." When Ray looks, Ozymandias meets his eyes with his own, fathomless black in the dark of the room but still warm, somehow, and knowing, almost amused, as if he's perfectly aware of what Ray was just thinking about Harry. On one of his antlers, on a flat part just before it curves up and branches, Ishbel is perched looking cross and ruffled the way she always does moments after waking up. "I was watching her sleep," Harry says, still hushed as though she's a wild bird he's trying not to spook into flight. "Then she opened her eyes and I knew you were awake."

"Why were you watching me sleep?" Ishbel demands, but she doesn't move from her spot, only turns her head to eye Harry warily as he battles the tangled covers away from his legs and gets up to step closer. He's tall, but there's something about the dim light and too-large pyjamas and the scale of the enormous stag that makes him appear tiny. It makes Ray need to squeeze his squinting eyes shut, scrub the crumbs of sleep dust away with his fingertips. When he looks up again, Harry's sitting on Ozymandias' claimed bed and gently stroking the back of his neck, up the curve of his head between the places where his antlers start.

"Why are you sleeping on my daemon?" he asks.

Ishbel sounds defensive when she says, "Because I want to," and Harry sort of laughs, quiet and frightened and amazed.

"That's my answer too."

When his hesitant fingers move from Ozymandias' head to the feathers at the very edge of Ishbel's wing, Ray feels his cheeks turn warm. Then Harry gets braver and strokes one fingertip from the top of her head down to her tail, and a thrilling, disorienting shudder of goosebumps rushes through Ray, down his limbs to make his hands feel tingly and his legs feel numb.

"You can't," Ozymandias says, but he doesn't sound at all like he means it, and when Ishbel leans against the upwards curve of his antler and says, "Yes he can," he falls silent again, breathing steadily, staring at Ray across the room. It's an invitation, or possibly a challenge. Perhaps when it comes to Harry and his daemon there's no difference between the two.

When he throws the covers aside, the air in the room is chilly on Ray's sweating bare chest and he can feel the thin cotton of his pyjama trousers sticking to his damp skin. An accidental noise escapes him when Harry touches Ishbel's wing again and causes a strange tumbling sensation in his stomach; it's something like the moment of fear at the top of a rollercoaster peak just as the brakes let go.

"I ought to have asked," Harry murmurs, not quite meeting his eyes when he comes to sit on the other side of the bed.

"You didn't need to," Ishbel tells him, because Ray's mouth feels too dry for all the reassuring words he's trying to speak. She spreads her wings for Harry's fingers, lets him trace the patterns of streaks and dots on her feathers, and it's like Ray can feel every whorl of fingerprint searing Harry's own pattern into him, a flickering blistering heat almost too much to bear.

It's part experiment when he touches Ozymandias, part payback, part some kind of sealed promise that this is really happening and it's alright. He can see Harry shiver at the first slide of his thumb up the stag's antler to rest at the point on one branched tip, then, all at once, whatever's holding Harry together inside seems to dissolve when Ray runs his fingers through the long coarse hair at the side of Ozymandias' neck. The sound that falls out of Harry's mouth is bordering on obscene: a shuddering, pleading sort of moan as he slumps bonelessly against his daemon's side and finds Ray's hand with the one not still touching Ishbel's feathers, winding their fingers together clumsily more as if he needs something to cling to than because he wants to hold hands.

"I've never," he starts, then trails off and licks his reddened mouth, fidgeting in place, when Ray starts to move his fingers through Ozymandias' scruff of fur again, leaving deep trenches that look shadowed black in the dim light of the room. "I've touched people. Nobody's ever touched him."

"Me too," Ray tells him, leaning against the solid bulk of the stag's warm body. "Nobody's ever touched her."

"Should I stop?"

"No. Should I?"

"No. Though I feel I rather have the advantage. There's so much more of him."

"So there is," Ray murmurs and, because it's a fucking weird night and lots of forbidden, outrageous things are allowed on fucking weird nights, he disentangles his hand from Harry's and slides the full width of his palm and fingers down Ozymandias' back as far as he can reach.

"God," Harry breathes, and when Ray's fingers come to rest an inch away from where he's laid his hot forehead he wriggles closer, nudging into the touch until Ray's stroking his hair with one hand, Ozymandias' with the other, and Harry's breathing goes wobbly and shallow. "Please don't stop."

He can see that Harry's hard in his pyjamas, and Ray's doing his best to keep his own erection pointed in a safe direction because if he accidentally starts jabbing that into Ozymandias' side it really will be a step too far, though it's really not easy to keep much of a thought in his head when he sees Harry's hand move down to his crotch, palming himself through the blue paisley silk. Harry's still playing with Ishbel's feathers with his other hand, sending hot flickering little pulses beating through Ray's body with his heartbeat, and he's afraid to touch himself the way Harry is because there's absolutely no question he'll go off like a rocket at the first brush of skin and then have to run away and die of embarrassment. Besides, it would mean moving one of his hands, and when Harry's writhing on the bed under his touch, so unselfconsciously and gorgeously wanton, that's simply not an option.

"I won't," he promises instead, pressing harder with his hand at the back of Ozymandias' neck, finding the same spot on Harry's and gently scratching lines through the gathering sweat there with his fingernails, moving up to tangle and tug in his damp mess of curls. "I'm not going to stop. Will you come?"

Harry's so demanding, twisting under Ray's hand trying to get more touch, harder pulling, more scratches. It's beautiful to watch him fall apart, see the flicker of his eyelids and the teeth on his savaged lower lip every time Ray strokes his daemon and his hair in time. " _Yes_ ," Harry says desperately, fighting his hand down the waistband of his pyjama trousers and out of sight so it becomes just a frantic fumbled movement under blurred patterned silk, "fuck, yes, right now."

"Do it," Ray tells him softly, leaning down to rest his head on the stag daemon's heaving side close by Harry's so he can watch his face upside-down instead of the movement of his hand.

"Go on," Ozymandias says, and Ishbel tells him, "Get on with it so we can all go back to sleep," even though she's pressing her warm little body urgently back against Harry's stroking fingers and giving Ray tremors all up and down his spine. He comes when Harry does, completely untouched, which fleetingly feels just as awful and embarrassing as he expected it to before he decides he just doesn't care any more and gives himself the extraordinary pleasure of watching Harry's face, every twitch of his brows and flutter of lashes and the way his somewhat ridiculous orgasm grimace morphs in stages into a giddy grin and then quiet, dazed laughter.

"I can still feel you touching him," he says when he's caught his breath, finding Ray's fingers where they're resting on the back of Ozymandias' neck and sliding his own in between them. "Not the touch. Just warmth."

"It doesn't hurt so much any more," Ishbel says suddenly. "Have you noticed?" As if to test it, she takes off into the air and flies to the farthest corner of the room, circles back to land on Ozymandias' topmost antler.

There's somehow a smile in his voice when he replies, "I doubt this is exactly what Arthur intended when he said pull ourselves together and get on with it."

Harry makes a disgusted noise. "For that, I'm not going to sleep on your bed with you after all."

"I should bloody hope not," Ozymandias says sternly. "After you groped each other's daemons?"

"Good point," Harry murmurs, an idiotic moony smile spreading slowly across his face, and when they both shakily stand up he offers Ray his arm like a parody of a gentleman to lead him to the sinks to clean up and then to his bed, the two of them folding carefully onto the single mattress like some piece of complicated interlocking origami.

The next time Harry speaks his voice is a quiet, sleepy murmur, kissing Ray's neck with breath as soft and warm as Ishbel's feathers. "What sort of a falcon is she?"

In the dim bluish shadows of the room Ray can't really see her, but he doesn't need to: he can feel her, even now. Can feel with a sort of sixth or seventh sense the way Ozymandias is big enough almost to surround her, a solid warmth and weight where she's tucked between his cheek and body and velvet antlers now, mirroring the way Harry's gone lax and pliant in the circle of Ray's arms as he starts to drowse.

"She's a merlin," he whispers, though he's not sure whether Harry's still awake to hear the answer.


End file.
